Strindberg

by Sue Prideaux (Yale)

August Strindberg was so skeptical of received dogma that he once lay down in a Berlin street with an upright broom as a sundial to satisfy himself that the world was round. Prideaux, his latest biographer, shares this passion for firsthand impressions, lamenting the reductive image of him as the dour misogynist who wrote “Miss Julie.” Her fresh observations occasionally border on the fanciful, as when she divines personalities based on photographs (her assessment of Strindberg’s mother: “sensuous, stubborn, and implacably stupid”). But she is adept at linking Strindberg’s work to his life—especially his volatile love affairs—and makes a strong case for his neglected comedies, calling “The People of Hemsö” “Scandinavia’s great comic masterpiece.” Prideaux is also alive to the ironies of the nineteenth-century woman question, recounting how Sweden’s leading feminist groups tried to have Strindberg imprisoned for blasphemy after his story collection “Getting Married” proposed women’s rights that were too “scandalously progressive” even for them. ♦